The Web Site for Critical RealismWSCR HOME

What's New?

20 January 2014Moved WSCR to a new server and spent several hours sorting out the various problems that emerged as a result. Finally had to ditch PHITE.

30 June 2012Fixed a problem with links to the papers in the WSCR Archive.

10 April 2012Uploaded a restructured and edited CSV data file for the WSCR Bibliography along with a revised version of the Bibliography's Perl-powered CSV display/search engine. The display format has been changed from MLA to APA, following the guidelines at the Purdue Online Writing Lab: APA Style. Restructuring the CSV file was no simple task: 466 citations had to be rearranged into several new columns -- there are now 13 columns of data in all -- in order to make it possible to display the citations in APA. But now that the restructuring and editing is, for the most part, completed, new citations can finally be added to the data file, which is currently quite a few years out of date.

06 April 2012SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The 15th International Association for Critical Realism Conference will be held in Grahamstown, South Africa, 18 to 20 July 2012. The conference theme will be "Global Change Challenges & Critical Realism Debates." The keynote speakers will be Ram Roy Bhaskar, Alan Norrie, Margaret Archer, and Leigh Price. Early registration closes Friday 18 May 2012. Late registration closes Friday 15 June 2012. For more information, please visit the official conference website: http://www.iacr2012conference.co.za/

23 September 2011NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T: At the request of Janet Joyce, Managing Director of the company that now holds the copyright to all of the back issues of JCR/Alethia, I have removed all of the PDFs of JCR/Alethia, 1998 to 2003, that used to be available for download via WSCR. Once upon a time, the PDFs of those issues were given away for free by IACR for the benefit of the CR community. But now, if you wish to read articles from those back issues, you will either have to purchase an IACR membership or convince a local university or college library to spend a chunk of their serials budget on an institutional subscription to JCR and then access the back issues via a computer terminal that is connected to the Web via one of the IP addresses associated with the subscription. Individual subscriptions to JCR do not include access to online content. Sorry.

25 June 2010SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Created a free banner advertisement (see above) for the new IACR Web site; if you know of any Web sites that continue to link to the old IACR URL, please ask them to update their links. IACR is worried about their Google ranking.

22 June 2010The 2010 IACR conference, "Engaging with the world: agency, institutions, historical formations," will be held at at the University of Padua, Italy, 19-21 July. For full details, see the conference web site: http://www.sociologiapadova.eu/iacr/.

14 November 2009Corrected several of the Web addresses in the Links section of WSCR.

04 February 2009Added new section, "JCR 1998-2003," that includes PDFs of all of the issues of Alethia/JCR that were given away for free on the old JCR site.

02 January 2007SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Drexel University, Philadelphia, will host the 11th Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR), 17-19 August. The primary theme of the conference will be The Place of the Real in the Human Studies. Details are available now on the official site of the 2007 Annual Conference of the IACR.

03 November 2003
Added a link to the Web site for "A Dictionary of Critical Realism" (to be published by Routledge in 2005). Look in the left navigational menu under Links > Special Projects.

25 June 2003
Added 5 citations for Frank Pearce (and his various co-authors) to the WSCR Bibliography.

21 June 2003
Replaced out-of-date email addresses with links to the Feedback page. Changed the "Printer Friendly" output to include more obvious links back to the source and home pages. And added a new PDF to the WSCR Archive.

18 June 2003
Added PHP script to count vistors to WSCR. The script counts each visitor when he or she initially arrives anywhere on the site, and then waits an hour before it counts that person again. Any visit of an hour or less counts as a "unique visit." (See page footer.)

18 April 2003
Added more records to the WSCR Bibliography, bringing the total number of records in the data file to 468.

03 March 2003
Added Liam O'Ruairc's "Fundamentally Irreconcilable," a review of Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical Contribution to Their Reconciliation by Andrew Collier, to the WSCR Archive.

01 March 2003
Added another 18 records to the WSCR Bibliography, thereby bringing the total number of records in the data file to 444.

28 February 2003
Added entries for every article and review published in Alethia, Journal of Critical Realism (incorporating Alethia), and Journal of Critical Realism, to the WSCR Bibliography, which now includes 426 records.

07 May 2000
The Web Site for Critical Realism (WSCR) has been
reviewed and selected for
inclusion in the Online
Subject Catalogue of Academic Resources (OSCAR). For
the curious, here's a link to the WSCR's Academic InfoBox in the
ARCH/RSCI DB. [Update: sad to say, OSCAR has since disappeared, so don't click those links! Oh, fickle finger of fame!]

Q.
Can you tell us what is distinctive about critical realism as
compared with other realist epistemologies and philosophies of science?

A. The answer to this question would take an interview in its own
right! But very briefly, it used a transcendental
method of argument, which most philosophies of science didn't
use, and then the transcendental argument became a dialectical one in
which the force was immanent critique. Secondly, it had the various
propositions about ontology, about the necessity of ontology, about
the particular place or shape of ontology - that the nature of the
world is presupposed by science  which it explicitly
thematised, and it was shown that rival philosophies of science
tacitly secreted or implicitly presupposed some distinctive, normally
Humean, ontology that was quite inadequate to the real nature of
being and the true character of science. The sort of ontology I was
arguing for was the kind of ontology in which the world was seen as
structured, differentiated and changing. And science was seen as a
process in motion attempting to capture ever deeper and more basic strata
of a reality at any moment of time unknown to us and perhaps not even
empirically manifest.

So
this created a radically new world view and this world view was
taken into the philosophy of social science, into ethics, into
politics to a small extent, into other branches of philosophy, into
the history of philosophy, and above all into the area of dialectic.

Now
there is a third thing besides the content of the particular thesis
at issue at any particular stage in the development of critical
realism. Through and through critical realism has been critical of
what we can call the nature of reality itself. Not the nature of
absolute reality, or the absolute structure of being - to be critical
of that is to put oneself into the position of God or the creator of
the universe - but rather it is to be critical of the nature of
actual, currently existing, social reality, or of our understandings
of social and natural reality. It has always taken epistemologies,
philosophical thesis, etc., as reflections of the society in which
they are generated and sustained. And as far as these theses are
misleading, they point to deep categorial confusions and errors
inherent in the very structure of social reality itself. So it was
natural to find an identification between people who were influenced
by critical realism and left-wing socialist, Marxist and other
critical currents of thought in the 1970s and through on into the 1990s.

And
so I would say that the three major distinctive things about
critical realism are: its transcendental and dialectical character;
the content of its particular theses; and the fact that it is
critical of the nature of reality itself, in the first instance
social reality, including the impact of human beings upon the natural
world in which they are embedded and in which they are at present
creating so much havoc.